Innovating Email List Marketing

 

Pound for pound, lists beat clicks every time

1. List marketing offers an almost inexhaustible source of leads. With paid search marketing, you are actually very limited in the number of leads you can bring in. There is heavy competition, high costs for popular keywords, and only a certain number of leads to begin with. Believe it or not, when I was using paid search, I actually exhausted the number of leads I was able to get-there simply weren’t enough to keep the sales pipeline greased. When I then turned to list marketing, however, I found an almost limitless supply of leads because it relies on a much simpler formula: opt-in email addresses. Can you imagine how many email addresses there are in the world? If even a tenth of that population opts in to receive third-party messages, your lead pool is still massive.
2. List marketing is active marketing. With paid search, you are at the mercy of the prospect-you won’t get a lead until they feel like searching for your product or service. Short of exercising sheer force to will them to Google you, you really have no control over when and where you can get leads-it’s passive marketing. List marketing is active, meaning you have control and can decide when you want to send an email blast, how many people you want to reach etc. It’s accessible anytime, anywhere with (as we’ve covered above) an almost inexhaustible amount of leads. Long story short: List marketing allows you make something happen with your marketing now, paid search doesn’t.




3. List marketing allows you to reinforce your brand. With an email blast, you have all the fun tools at your disposal like branding colors, voice, and style. These elements allow your audience to really get to you know better by letting your company personality shine through. PPC ads, with their strict formatting and anonymous feel, reduce everyone to the same rigid template, so the ads look generally the same. It’s very difficult to communicate brand within such stringent requirements, which in turn makes it harder to convert leads.




4. Email is more user-friendly. List marketing leverages email offers, which is ideal since most people are still more comfortable using and interacting with email. It’s a familiar, friendly medium, so if a great offer pops up in their inbox, that’s all the tipping point they need to convert to a lead. People are not as comfortable with paid search ads because PPC ads are more traditional “noise” ads that litter an otherwise serene search experience; many people simply tune them out even when they are searching for a relevant product online.

Update: Want to hear the other side of the story? Read Elizabeth Marsten’s “PPC Goddess” rebuttal here. Then chime in in the comments and let us know if you are #Team Lists or #Team Clicks!

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email marketing, list marketing, paid search marketing, ppc, search marketing